It seems that ASP.NET MVC doesn't allow for strongly-typed partial views. If anyone knows of a clean way to do it, I'd love to know!

Take the following typical page declaration:

<%@ Page Language="C#" Inherits="System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage<Foo>" %>

This declaration allows us to access the Foo.Bar property in the view page using the following syntax: Model.Bar. This works really well, and we even get Intellisense for Foo when accessing the Model property in the editor. In contrast, if we inherited from the non-generic ViewPage, Model becomes a simple object type, which means type-casting to get to our passed in model object.

However, using partial pages with a similar technique does not work. For example, if we have a partial page (ViewPage or ViewUserControl) and call it like below, it will not allow for strong typing of the page:

Html.RenderPartial("DisplayFoo", foo)

Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'System.Web.Mvc.ViewPage'.

One work-around is to create a code-behind file, and specify the strong typing there, and then inherit the partial page from the code-behind. But I really don't like that. RC1 made great strides to get rid of the code-behind mess, and I would prefer not to reintroduce it just for this.

Update: Thanks to bradleylandis in the ASP.NET MVC forum, he correctly figured out that I had my partial page in a folder other than the Views folder. He mentioned that you need to copy the web.config file from the Views folder to any folder that you serve view pages out of. After doing that, I now have a strongly typed partial page.